An individual who plays Pumped Up Kicks on repeat undergoes habituation to the voice of a person preparing to kill. The material seats the listener inside the shooter's first person and pairs a lethal taunt with a chantable refrain, and with repetition singing along constitutes rehearsal of the threat. Alarm gives way to familiarity.

Continued exposure attenuates the response an announced homicide ordinarily provokes. The circumstances sketched around the boy acquire explanatory force, and the listener comes to receive the threat as narrative texture. Recognition of a stated intent as an intent recedes.

A society that circulates Pumped Up Kicks as common repertoire absorbs a homicidal threat into shared recreation. Mass repetition converts a first-person warning into a refrain that crowds complete together, and the language of a child arming himself enters ordinary speech detached from its referent. Lethal intent becomes something a population performs.

At the population level, the threshold for treating an announced threat as serious rises. Communities grow slower to register a stated plan as a plan, and the words that would name the danger lose force through repetition as chorus. People hold in common a phrase whose content is a promise to shoot children.